I have a PC that dual-boots between Mint Linux and Windows 11 - I have to have Windows for work purposes, but I tend to use Linux for everything else. Because it supports both platforms, I use LibreOffice as my office productivity suite of choice.
One of the things I’d like to use LibreOffice for requires me to use Custom Dictionaries… However, the key thing here is that I want to be able to share the same custom dictionary file[s], irrespective of which operating system I am running.
I’ve done some basic exploration/digging and come up with the following:-
On Mint Linux, LibreOffice stores custom dictionaries in the following location:-
/home/{user}/.config/libreoffice/4/user/wordbook/
On Windows 11, LibreOffice stores custom dictionaries in the following location:-
c:\Users{user}\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\4\user\wordbook\
I also happen to have a QNAP NAS, so on my Linux build I renamed the “wordbook” folder to “wordbook_orig” and I created a symbolic link to a copy of the folder on my NAS. It works perfectly - when I boot in to Linux and launch LibreOffice Writer, it spell checks perfectly using the network-hosted copy of my custom dictionary file…
On windows, I can then go to the /4/user/ folder and I rename the default “wordbook” folder to “wordbook_orig”… I then right-click in Windows Explorer and select “New” and “Shortcut”… and I plug in the details that take me to the exact same location on my NAS.
At first glance, everything looks OK.
However, I can run LibreOffice perfectly on Linux, but when I try the same thing on Windows, the program still launches, but it does not seem to see or import my custom dictionary. If I then go to …
\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\4\user,
I then see that the running binary has created a new local copy of “wordbook” - so the “user” folder now contains 2 entries named “wordbook”, except that one is my symbolic link and the other is a recreated local folder, put there by the LibreOffice binary.
I’d be very grateful if anyone can suggest any reason why LibreOffice isn’t respecting symbolic links - and if so, whether there might be a runtime flag or other parameter I could set in order to force it to do so, such that I can share my dictionary between Linux and Windows versions.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can make.